An Oklahoma Wal-Mart store manager and his stepdaughter played key roles in allowing a man disguised as an armored truck driver to walk into the store and stroll out with about $78,000, police said Thursday.

U.S. Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker on Wednesday praised Wal-Mart Stores Inc. for its initiative to buy more American-made goods and support the nation’s manufacturing industry. Pritzker was the keynote speaker at the opening session at the U.S. Manufacturing Summit that Wal-Mart hosted at Bentonville High School.

The ninth edition — now officially the Wal-Mart NW Arkansas Championship Presented by P&G — was won by Na Yeon Choi on June 28 in front of large crowds, most of whom were rooting for former University of Arkansas star Stacy Lewis, who finished in a tie for third.

Thrive Apartments, a mixed-used complex with 62 units, are at the intersection of Southwest A and Southwest Fourth streets a few blocks off the downtown Bentonville square. ERC Cos. of Barling built the complex through its in-house ERC Construction and it opened June 1.

When Wal-Mart announced in February that it would raise the hourly pay of its lowest-paid employees to at least $10 within the following 12 months, I thought the company had finally decided its Everyday Low Price strategy might not be the be-all and end-all at Wal-Mart going forward.

Northwest Arkansas isn’t California’s Silicon Valley and has a long way to go before it can be considered remotely comparable, but technology industry leaders say the area is proving to be on the short list of best places in the field.

Wal-Mart Stores will begin charging fees to almost all vendors for stocking their items in new stores and for warehousing inventory, raising pressure on suppliers as the world’s largest retailer battles higher costs from wage hikes.

Facebook is now bigger than Wal-Mart, at least when it comes to its value on the stock market. The world's biggest online social network knocked the world's largest retailer out of the top 10 list of the highest-valued companies in the Standard & Poor's 500 index.

A collection of labor and community groups filed a complaint with the Internal Revenue Service accusing Wal-Mart Stores Inc's charitable foundation of violating its tax exempt status by using donations in an attempt to facilitate store openings in urban areas.

The cost of a customer rewards campaign by a Canadian bank giving away flowers and baseball tickets had to have been dwarfed by the enormous goodwill it generated. So how much greater then is the goodwill generated by something like Murphy Oil Corp.’s El Dorado Promise?